18 January 2015 12:07 AM

We are on the verge of founding Britain’s first Thought Police. Using the excuse of terrorism – whose main victim is considered thought – Theresa May’s Home Office is making a law which attacks free expression in this country as it has never been attacked before.

We already have some dangerous laws on the books. The Civil Contingencies Act can be used to turn Britain into a dictatorship overnight, if politicians can find an excuse to activate it.

But the Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill, now slipping quietly and quickly through Parliament, is in a way even worse. It tells us what opinions we should have, or should not have.

As ever, terrorism is the pretext. Yet there is no evidence to suggest that the criminal drifters, school drop-outs and drug-addled losers who do much terrorist dirty work (and whose connections with vast worldwide conspiracies are sketchy to say the least) will be even slightly affected by it.

In a consultation paper attached to the Bill, all kinds of institutions, from nursery schools (yes really, see paragraph 107) to universities, are warned that they must be on the lookout for ‘extremists’.

But universities are told they have a ‘responsibility to exclude those promoting extremist views that support or are conducive to terrorism’.

Those words ‘conducive to’ are so vague that they could include almost anybody with views outside the mainstream.

What follows might have come from the laws of the Chinese People’s Republic or Mr Putin’s Russia. Two weeks’ advance notice of meetings must be given so that speakers can be checked up on, and the meeting cancelled if necessary.

Warning must also be given of the topic, ‘sight of any presentations, footage to be broadcast, etc’. A ‘risk assessment’ must be made on whether the meeting should be cancelled altogether, compelled to include an opposing speaker or (even more creepy) ‘someone in the audience to monitor the event’.

Institutions will be obliged to promote ‘British values’. These are defined as ‘democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance for those with different faiths and beliefs’. ‘Vocal and active opposition’ to any of these is now officially described as ‘extremism’.

Given authority’s general scorn for conservative Christianity, and its quivering, obsequious fear of Islam, it is easy to see how the second half will be applied in practice. As for ‘democracy’, plenty of people (me included) are not at all sure we have it, and wouldn’t be that keen on it if we did.

Am I then an ‘extremist’ who should be kept from speaking at colleges? Quite possibly. But the same paragraph (89, as it happens) goes further. ‘We expect institutions to encourage students to respect other people with particular regard to the protected characteristics set out in the Equality Act 2010’.

These ‘protected characteristics’, about which we must be careful not to be ‘extremist’, are in fact the pillars of political correctness – including disability, gender reassignment, pregnancy and maternity, race, sex and sexual orientation.

The Bill is terrible in many other ways. And there is no reason to believe that any of these measures would have prevented any of the terrorist murders here or abroad, or will do so in future.

They have been lifted out of the box marked ‘try this on the Home Secretary during a national panic’, by officials who long to turn our free society into a despotism.

Once, there would have been enough wise, educated, grown-up people in both Houses of Parliament to stand up against this sort of spasm. Now most legislators go weak at the knees like simpering teenage groupies whenever anyone from the ‘Security’ or ‘Intelligence’ services demands more power and more money.

So far there has been nothing but a tiny mouse-squeak of protest against this dangerous, anti-British, concrete-headed twaddle. It will go through. And in ten years’ time we’ll wonder why we’re locking people up for thinking. We’ll ask: ‘How did that happen?’ This is how it happens.

British values...it's a baffling topic these days

You'd never guess just how few homosexuals there were from the way we go on about it.

In a spot check to make sure their Christian school was teaching ‘British values’, baffled tots in Sunderland were asked by government inspectors about ‘what lesbians do’.

Almost immediately after this revelation, plans were announced in Manchester for an entire school devoted to homosexual, bisexual and transgender children.

I’m not actually against such a school, if enough people want it. Let a hundred flowers bloom, as far as I’m concerned.

Let’s have atheist schools, too, and see how they work out.

But if we can select pupils on the grounds of their sexual orientation, why is it illegal to select on the grounds of ability? Something wrong here, surely?

As for the lesbian question, I was 12 before I even knew what a call-girl was, let alone a lesbian, and look how I turned out – not to mention my grasp of ‘British values’.

Finally a film that's got it right

For once, a film about real events that comes close to getting it right. The Theory Of Everything, a fictionalised but broadly true account of the marriage of Professor Stephen Hawking and his first wife Jane, is intelligent and profound, irresistibly moving andsurprisingly funny in places.

The recent past is subtly recreated. The plot pivots on the extraordinary fact that Mrs Hawking – an academic in her own right – maintained a Christian belief despite her husband’s active atheism.

Their marriage, her selfless love despite his illness, the marriage’s eventual breakdown, thedreadful contrast between Hawking’s soaring mind and his collapsing, failing body, mustconstantly have challenged the deepest beliefs of both of them.

Eddie Redmayne is, of course, superb as he inhabits the professor’s life and becomes him.But Felicity Jones is even better, and, rather surprisingly, manages to portray Jane as an even more remarkable human being than her husband.

Lethal cost of the great crime lie

Somehow the Government has so far kept the lid on the fact that despite fiddled figures claiming that crime is dropping, our prisons are full, and exploding with violence, gang rivalry and drugs.

Prison officers, the main civilising influence in these dreadful liberal institutions, are in growing danger of severe violence.

Ten are attacked every day. On Radio 4’s File On 4 on Tuesday, Peter McParlin, the chairman of the Prison Officers’ Association, said: ‘I wake up every morning thinking, “Today is the day one of my colleagues will be murdered in their work.” ’

This crisis is the result of 50 years of Left-wing failure, which has ensured that wrongdoers don’t encounter serious punishment until they are already hardened criminals.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

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18 October 2013 1:14 PM

The following is a consolidation of comments I have posted in comment threads today, on various subjects.

Mr Heresy Hunter shows no signs of having actually read the above (especially the link to the Spectator article) [This refers to a posting by the Heresy Hunter, which appeared this morning on the 'Free Riders' thread] . He concentrates on, and wilfully misunderstands, an article I wrote 11 years ago, and does not even read one I wrote last year in which I make clear a change of view - that is, I no longer think the issue of homosexuality important or central enough to be worth arguing about, especially as people such as Mr Heresy Hunter will always misrepresent what I say about it anyway, as he proves most satisfactorily here. I am reminded of my own inner contortions when, as a Cold Warrior, I tried for years to believe that Mikhail Gorbachev was in fact a fraud, and was seeking to strengthen Soviet Power by deceiving the West. I realised that I had been wrong when Gorbachev's silky spokesman , Gennady Gerasimov was teasing Western journalists like me at a Moscow press briefing. He smilingly responded to their suspicious questions with the words. 'Gentlemen. I understand that we have done to you the cruellest thing we could possibly have done. We have deprived you of an enemy'. So I understand why Mr Heresy Hunter's life will be bare and dull without heretics to hunt. I urge him to seek them elsewhere. There must be some Baptist pastor in Nebraska whom he could pursue, who genuinely does believe the things Mr Heresy Hunter so much wishes that I believed. .

**

Mr Wooderson writes to ask if I accept that 'not all atheists are motivated in their unbelief by a selfish desire to be free from moral accountability, and that in fact some are led to their position by a sincere conviction that the claims of theism are false? I'm not sure. They'll almost never tell us (Maugham being a rare exception), and I have no way of making them. Since I was for many years an atheist myself, I can of course consult my own experience, recalling that *at the time* I would not have been willing to admit the truth, and would have angrily resented anyone pointing it out. This makes me smile indulgently at the angry, resentful denials I get from current atheists. It seems to me to be the only possible explanation of what is otherwise inexplicable. I know why *I* go beyond agnosticism to theist belief. I know I don't have to. Therefore I must want to, and it is quite easy to explain why I want to. The same must surely apply to them. They don't want what I want. They want it not to be so. But it's not going to make people love you, when you say you hate the thought that the universe might actually be just. So let's go on about circumcision, or Mormons, or greedy televangelists, or fundamentalists. I'm not sure that a person who has lost his or her faith as a result of a tragedy can be described as an 'atheist'. Do such people go about proclaiming that they 'know' there is no God, and sneering at people who think there is one? Do they welcome the loss of faith? Or hope to regain it? I know of no studies, but see this as an attempt to confuse two different types of person.

He says ' After all, there are many of us who – while perhaps not 'quiet and despairing' – are neither militant nor intolerant, and have no wish to see Christian morality 'dismantled'.' Are there? I don't understand how anyone can arrive at a *conviction* that there is no God without desiring this to be the case. If they desire that, then they *must* be intolerant of Christianity. Nothing in life or knowledge compels such a view, any more than it compels theism. Why are they not content to be agnostics, if their view is not determined by desire? It is quite comical watching these people pretend that they are not motivated by desire, so as to avoid examining their own motives. Why would that be? I should state here, in answer to an earlier comment from someone else, that (as I have many times said before) this point goes both ways, and that *of course* my theism is motivated by desire, most of all a desire that Justice should exist in the Universe, which is of course dependent on the idea (also a very strong desire of mine) that death is not the end of life

**

John Vernau asks an interesting question. (first quoting me) ‘"I suspect militant practical atheism is quite common in...[various degenerate classes] ...Those who spread this idea aren’t as popular as they are in the bookshops for no reason at all." "I am sure that one of the reasons for atheist coyness about their (undoubted) motives is an intelligent fear that their idea might catch on more widely."--PH Hmm. Are there two kinds of atheists, one militant, practical and spreaders of the idea, who have 'converted' the other kind; the dog-in-the-manger types now coy about their motives? Or are the 'militant practical' atheists, fighting to 'convert' only limited numbers (sufficient for banking, cohabitation etc) a different beast altogether from 'those who spread this idea', these spreaders (perhaps not even atheists!) secretly subverting the coy militants by over-popularising their idea? Or is there just the one group; militant and possibly practical atheists who, wanting to 'convert' believers, spread the atheist idea? Their books are popular. But they are coy about their motives, for fear of being too successful. They try, but not too hard. Their fears might be intelligent but their missionary zeal, not so much. I have to admit I'm confused. Perhaps I've been reading too many postings by mononymic contributors and I've addled my brain. ...Cup of tea ... lie down...’

Are there two kinds of atheist? Well, in a way. The ‘Practical Atheists’ of whom I so often write, who range the blasted housing estates, probably couldn’t pronounce or spell the word, and if asked would say they believed in nothing. But they are the consequence of the collapse of Christian belief among the British masses during the last century. The ‘New Atheists’, most of whom are prosperous academics or men of letters, living far from these blasted regions and often in some luxury, do not at present connect their beliefs with such people. There was an incident during the so-called ‘riots’ of 2011 when an expensive West London restaurant was invaded by Practical Atheists, who were eventually driven off by the kitchen staff. This may be one of the few recorded instances of the two sorts of Atheist actually meeting (I am presuming that there were such people among the diners at this fine establishment. There usually are in such places, and it is not that far from the BBC). They probably did not recognise each other as co-religionists, but they are.

If the beliefs of the ‘rioters’, about property, manners, propriety, violence and honesty spread into the functioning core of British middle-class life – so that the walk home from the station was never safe, the trains crashed frequently because the track maintenance workers and the drivers were drug abusers, medical prescriptions often failed disastrously because the manufacturers had watered down the dose or sold time-expired goods to the NHS, food wasn’t safe to eat because those who handled and stored it couldn’t be trusted to stay clean, refrigerators were turned down low to save money and the meat went off, the servants could not be trusted not to steal or to allow thieves or kidnappers into the house, the only way to get good schooling or good medical treatment (or any assistance from the police) was to pay bribes, the surgeons in the hospital were reliably drunk or high on drugs, the taxi drivers quite likely to rape or rob their clients, the sewage came gurgling back up the lavatory, and tapwater wasn’t safe to drink because competence and duty had died out in the ranks of the sewerage workers, the banks and pension funds collapsed and lost all their money because their employees were corrupt and dishonest, letters never arrived because the postmen stole the valuable ones and dumped the others – well, in that case I can imagine these Godless professors and philosophers harrumphing away on the leader page of the ‘Daily Mail’, demanding ‘crackdowns ‘ and who knows what else, to put things right. Of course, they wouldn’t put things right. Crackdowns, by their nature, never do.

That’s what the Third World is like. It’s the heritage and afterglow of centuries of Christianity, and in our case rigorous Protestant Christianity, which guarantee that our lives are still, for a while yet, daily miracles of order, safety and efficiency. I really don’t think the ‘New Atheists’ want that collapse into the Third World to happen anywhere near them. Who would? They’re happy for their abstract ideas to spread among the sort of people they know and like, people whose activities have very little impact on whether anything works or not. And for some years almost any book attacking God has had the certainty of a good and lucrative sale (though I think this is now tailing off). They know in their hearts what these abstractions actually mean in life. They know (as do we all) how to appear virtuous in public so that you can expect the same in return. But they dislike spelling it out, and one reason for that must surely be that they grasp – and fear - what will happen if their own beliefs become universal. As for being afraid of being found out, all moral systems require detrrent punishments for those whose consciences fail. The difference between the authority of God and all others is that the moral person consciously and deliberately chooses to accept that authority, knowing that if he wants the protection of justice, he must accept that the same justice applies to him. It would be a pretty immoral person who imagined himself so perfect that he needed no measure of fear to keep him from doing wrong. As for what I *would* do if I believed there was no God, I do not know. But it is quite enough to recall what I *did* do when I believed this.

Why are Atheist opinions worthy of respect when they are so profoundly unpleasant? Because they may be right about the universe, and it is as well that we understand the alternative to what we have. We can only do that if we allow those views to be heard respectfully. My view is that even if they were right, it would make sense to live as if they were wrong.

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17 October 2013 5:51 PM

I am asked in what way atheists are free riders in Christian societies. In this way: They expect the benefits of such societies, general honesty in all dealings, self-restraint, sobriety and gentleness in public and private conduct, diligence in work, marital fidelity and parental responsibility, the tender care of the old (these are examples) to persist after the morality which prescribed them has been dismantled.

Practical atheism, as I term it, is common in those blasted regions of our cities where nobody is married, there are no fathers, the remaining shops have steel shutters, the schools are places of dread for anyone who values learning or order, the police only visit to flash their lights for a few minutes before departing (and anyone who calls them is a ‘grass’), the ground-floor windows have bars, and the vandalised phone-boxes are smeared with spittle and littered used needles.

It’s also common among many bankers and other businessmen, who get away with what they can; among young people who procure abortions because babies are inconvenient to them, and older people who dissolve marriages because they are inconvenient, who drink to excess, take drugs and allow their children to do so.

These habits of mind then spread into the trades and professions where selfishness can cost more than a little self-esteem – the banker who risks his depositor’s money, the police officer who lies in court, or who fails to act when a case like that of Fiona Pilkington comes before him, the lawyer who fails to protect his clients’ interests with sufficient diligence and attention, the surgeon (or the school bus driver, or the train driver, or the lorry driver) who has cannabis in his bloodstream while he operates, the journalist who prefers to hack a phone than to do the hard grind of proper reporting.

We begin to see this around us. The test is always what people do when they think nobody is looking. Civilisation doesn’t suddenly collapse, any more than our northern Sun suddenly sets. I suspect militant practical atheism is quite common in the aborting classes, the divorcing classes, the cohabiting classes, the banking classes and the drug-taking classes. Those who spread this idea aren’t as popular as they are in the bookshops for no reason at all.

They don’t mind doing these things. But as their comfortable world frays at the edges, and they find they can’t rely on the interior goodness and trustworthiness of others, they will (I suspect) angrily complain that things seem to have gone downhill a bit. They should realise that this is because they have helped push them downhill. If you don’t yourself accept that you must be guided in your actions by a just, unchanging authority which knows your secret heart, you can’t expect others to do this either. I am sure that one of the reasons for atheist coyness about their (undoubted) motives is an intelligent fear that their idea might catch on more widely. What if the servants turned atheist? Atheism’s only any fun when it’s the creed of a safe and smug minority, surrounded, served and protected by believers.

I don’t, by the way, recall Mr Wooderson asking me the question about the bereaved or tragedy-stricken that he says he put to me. Had he done so, I should have said that bereaved people are entitled to think what they like, as we all are, and it’s obvious that it’s always hard for those who have faced cruel loss to believe in a benevolent God. But I know of no examples of the modern aggressive, intolerant atheists who have come to their conclusions by this route. The militant intolerant atheists are a different thing altogether from the quiet despairing people who feel abandoned by goodness.

Our resident Heresy Hunter contributes ‘Mr Hitchens's position on homosexuality isn't as clear as he would have us believe. He says that homosexual acts between consenting adults should be permitted in private, although he also says that gay people who ask to be accepted as normal damage marriage,’

Heresy Hunter :’so presumably he wants gay people to hide who they really are.’

***Why does the Heresy Hunter presume this thing? He may be able to get away with this sort of twisted insinuation in the darkened, flickering cellars of his inquisitional trade, but not in the light of day. Can he explain his logic? I have never said, and do not think anything of the kind. I believe in freedom of speech, and leaving people to make their own moral decisions this side of crime. I don’t believe homosexual acts should be crimes. I do think, and have in the past said, that public declarations of homosexuality are incompatible with a conservative moral position, as is encouragement of divorce, advocacy of , or calls for legalisation of illegal drugtaking, advocacy of cohabitation and the deliberate encouragement of fatherless families. That obviously means that I don't think someone can say these things and claim to be a moral and social conservative. But I can’t stop anyone making them, and wouldn’t want to if I could.

The Heresy Hunter continues : ‘What I am trying to ascertain is a) exactly how announcing that you are gay stops straight couples from marrying and having children’

**Me, too. How does it? I haven’t said it does, and don’t think it does. All sexual acts outside lifelong marriage are in my view immoral and damage marriage in one way or another, but that’s an awful lot of acts, and the homosexual ones form a minor, nay, tiny part of them. Divorce, cohabitation and the deliberate subsidy of fatherless families are the issue.

Heresy Hunter again: ‘b) to what extent does Mr Hitchens think gay people should pretend that they don't exist’

***To no extent.

Heresy Hunter again: ‘and c) how far Mr Hitchens would like this idea to be reflected in the law’.

*** As I don’t espouse the idea, I have no desire to see it reflected in the law, by definition. Even if I did, it doesn’t seem to me to be a matter for the law.

The Heresy Hunter again: ‘ (which is why I am asking him about Russia, for they have just enacted a law that is similar - in principle at least, but obviously much worse in scale - to that of Section 28, which Mr Hitchens didn't believe to be a bad thing). ‘

**Well, if it’s not the same as Section 28, then it can’t be compared with it. If it *is* the same, I suppose I can’t consistently object to it in someone else’s country, though Section 28 is deader than the deadest doornail - and other people’s countries, as I keep saying, are none of my business anyway. I think the teaching of post-Christian sexual morality is not the proper business of state schools in a society founded on Christian morality.

The Heresy Hunter again: ‘Does Mr Hitchens believe that speaking about homosexuality as though it is normal in front of children or teenagers would reduce the amount of gay people? ‘

*** I shouldn’t have thought there could be such a crude cause and effect, as life is seldom so simple. But Matthew Parris, who knows far more about this than I do, has written interestingly on influence and homosexuality (the Times, 6th August 2006). I wish I could reproduce the whole thing but it’s behind a paywall) He concludes ‘Sexuality is a supple as well as subtle thing and can sometimes be influenced, even promoted ; I think that in some people some drives can be discouraged and others encouraged; I think some people can choose. I wish I were conscious of being able to. I would choose to be gay.’ Perhaps he should pester Mr Parris on the subject.

The Heresy Hunter continues ‘Would he like to see such a policy introduced in this country?’

**I have no interest in this subject any more. I also have no illusions that anything I say or do will influence any policy, so I might as well propose to alter the courses of the planets as urge the adoption of policies. At one time, I imagined that the 1967 Abse compromise was a line worth defending. I now think I was wasting my time with a futile, trivial diversion.

And the Heresy Hunter concludes: ‘And when is he going to answer my charge that he is worse than a bigot, because a bigot's disapproval of gay people is irrational, whereas he deliberately chose to believe that gay people are abnormal and immoral, and to treat them as such, when he chose to live in world with meaning?’

***The depth of misunderstanding here is so vast that I doubt I can bridge it, since it is wilful rather than rational. The Christian is commanded to love his fellow men and women, even tiresome, prejudiced Heresy Hunters. He condemns wrong *actions*, starting with his own, and seeks to ensure that society does not encourage wrong actions in others. The statement that such and such a type of person is ‘abnormal and immoral’ is not compatible with this view, as all fall short and all can also be forgiven. Also, I’m not sure where he has got the word ‘abnormal’. I should have thought anyone with much experience of life would know that ‘normality’ is a bit of an illusion. Nor is it always desirable. As for ‘treating them as such’, what on earth does he mean by this? What is this ‘treatment’ that he imagines? It’s tedious to ask, because I know I shall get a response, but am by no means sure of getting an answer. People such as this Heresy Hunter do not seek or welcome generous rational discussion, though they purport to be innocent inquirers. That said, if he surprises me with reason and generosity, I’ll reply. But if he acts according to his usual behaviour, I shall not.

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16 October 2013 3:33 PM

1. I have pointed out here not above a thousand times, I do not think that non-believers cannot have a morality. The 'Golden Rule' is, for instance, open to anyone (though it suffers from the problem that much of what we do, we do in secret and so it actually operates as 'Appear to do unto others what you would wish them to do unto you' . You can see the difficulty.

Yet I am resigned to the same nonsense being repeated over and over again(along with the claim that believers claim to 'know' that God exists, rather than believing this to be the case, and are all strict Bible literalists, and is often coupled with the weird suggestion (is this stuff now taught in schools?) that religious belief is incompatible with 'science'.

The cruder atheists, pitifully uninformed about the nature of faith, which they have never bothered to investigate, invariably make these charges against believers, usually going on to say that they themselves are 'just as good' as believers. I don't doubt it. Probably better, in the case of this believer. But this is yet another demonstration of their ceaseless missing of the whole point of the argument, which is 'How do we decide what is absolutely, unalterably good ?' If you don't believe in a deity, surely the matter is always negotiable. and open to a bit of self-interest. If an atheist says he is 'just as good', as a Christian, then he is actually saying 'I am just as good as you according to a set of standards whose whole basis I reject'.

To which my response is, thank you for making the effort, but why do you care, if you really believe what you say you believe? And if it's because you prefer to live in a society ordered by Christian belief, you're a free rider, happy to catch the train, but unwilling to pay the fare.

It's all tediously obvious. But the atheists never, ever get it. Since most of them are perfectly intelligent, this can only be explained by wilfulness, not by stupidity.

Which brings us, yet again, to the question of why they so much want there not to be a God, and cannot accept any doubt or dissent on the matter.

2. By the way, on a related issue, isn't it interesting that, even when I consciously steer away from the issue of homosexuality, for reasons I've explained elaborately in the past and can be found in the index, the heresy-hunters petulantly demand that I speak out on it, and draw unwarranted conclusions from my silence. They seek to make a window into my soul. They cannot accept silence. They must have submission. Nothing short of 'I Love Big Brother' will satisfy these would-be totalitarians.

It would be hard to find a better illustration of my point. This is that it is a minor issue, not remotely as important as the death of marriage and the mass-killing of unborn babies, the real battlegrounds of the sexual revolution. Yet it is ceaselessly elevated into undeserved magnitude by people who have little concern for the individuals involved, but seek to use the subject to trap naive and unworldly moral conservatives, whom they will then condemn as 'bigots'. They will do this anyway. But I have no desire to help them.

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18 July 2013 12:34 PM

3.25 pm Thursday: Several readers have reported that this link is not working. A kind contributor (to whom many, many thanks) has, in the interim, offered his own recording (this was made in the hall, and is a bit boomy, but I think perfectly audible).

Mr Stadlen and I would like to thank Matthew Hayden and Homer Shahnamy for their invaluable help.

Skilled Hitchensblog engineers are working deep in the tunnels beneath Hitchensblog headquarters, in an effort to fix the original problem. I am told it may take some time. As we are also unable to show you a short film of a potter's wheel, or play some harmless music to entertain you while you wait, you could read some of the other postings here on this unique indexed and archived blog.

I believe the link here will take you to a recording of ‘Head2Head’, in which I was interviewed by Matthew Stadlen, and answered audience questions, on the evening of Tuesday 16th July 2013, at The Tabernacle, in Powis Square, Notting Hill.

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03 June 2013 5:07 PM

As some of you may have noticed, this weblog has been a little less energetic during the past fortnight, as I’ve been away from my desk. Among my many relaxations during this period were a visit to the cinema to see a film praised by reviewers ‘Populaire’, an experience so embarrassingly bad that I left after 30 minutes, amazed that everyone else was sticking it out. Such is the life of a minor celebrity that my early exit was observed and recorded on Twitter. True to form on that medium (where I can do nothing right) , my watcher took the opportunity to make a snide remark – suggesting that I’d let because the film was foreign. Well, do you know what? I knew it was foreign when I bought the tickets, and, having lived five years of my life abroad by my own choice, and visited 57 different countries, I’ve nothing against foreign-ness. What I didn’t know was just how feeble and incredible it was going to be. For those of us who like going to the cinema, but who have seen too many good films to be able to endure bad ones, life is becoming rather full of such disappointments. Perhaps someone could open a cinema devoted to showing nothing but proven classics, in comfort (much as the old Hampstead Everyman once did) . I can’t be the only person ( can I ?) who’d pay to watch them in a proper cinema on a large screen, preferably without having to endure any advertisements for cars or Virgin TV.

This is the third time I’ve given up on a film in the last two years (and I’ve nearly abandoned a couple of others too). All of them, by the way, have been French. Until this bout of early exits ( and my apologies to those who had to stand to let me out), I don’t think I’d walked out of a film since I stormed out of ‘Taxi Driver’ in a Golders Green cinema more than 30 years ago. That was an act of demonstrative spite and rage, my first cinema walk-out after many long minutes of hestitation. I had been repeatedly told that ‘Taxi Driver’ was a great work of art, etc etc etc. But it turned out to be crude, dispiriting, squalid and violent, and without any moral or cultural purpose that I could see then or can work out now. Interestingly, my walk-out on that occasion was met with snarls and rebukes from others in the audience, annoyed in some way that I wasn’t enjoying watching somebody have his fingers shot off. Sorry, guys. It just didn’t do anything for me. And since, then, when I have seen actual shooting and its actual consequences, I haven’t at all changed my mind. It’s disgusting. Such offences must come in our fallen world. But who would volunteer to watch them?

Anyway, that wasn’t what I wanted to talk about. A far more agreeable experience was a re-read of much of Simon Raven’s ‘Alms for Oblivion’ series of scurrilous, but captivating novels. I have a tattered paperback set of these in disagreeably lurid covers, which would put me off like anything if I didn’t know what the books were really like.

Can I unreservedly recommend them to all my readers? Not a bit of it. I’ve discussed here the two other sagas of English life in serial novel form, Charles Snow’s ‘Strangers and Brothers’ (which I unfashionably enjoy) and Anthony Powell’s (say it to rhyme with ‘Hole’. I don’t know why, but it sums up the snobbery rather well that he is supposed to have refused to have a leak fixed by a plumber who dared to rhyme his surname with ‘Owl’, so enduring extra days of freezing leaks rather than abandon his supposedly more noble pronunciation. ) ‘Dance to the Music of Time’ . Both have their joys and their disadvantages. Neither of them are as exhilarating or as brutally honest about human foibles as Raven. Nor are they anything like as well-written.

I should also mention here that neither of them contain the passages of sheer filth that Raven liked to indulge in. Now, when I say filth, I mean filth. I know that lots of people get up to odd things in their bedrooms, and up to even odder things inside their heads, and there it is. Sexual fantasies are frequently rather startling, and some people may long to know the details of other people’s - but I prefer not to. Personally, I’d cheerfully Bowdlerise these books, removing various scenes of voyeurism and embarrassing sex, even (though reluctantly) excising the various spanking fantasies of one particular person who is singled out for rather a lot of this sort of thing. It’s not that I enjoy the fantasies, just that, attributed to this particular person, they are especially funny. And I’d more or less dispense with the eighth book in the series, ‘Come Like Shadows’ , apart from the final scene in which the appalling yet marvellous Lord Canteloupe of the Estuary of the Severn delivers some excellent advice on how to deal with foreigners, in this case Americans. Suitable pruned of their bad sex, they might have a higher reputation, a higher reputation which in my view they deserve.

Simon Raven’s life and work by the way, offer an interesting commentary on the modern use of the word ‘Gay’ as a synonym for ‘Homosexual’.

I think it’s more or less true to say that Captain Raven, of the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry, was homosexually inclined, though he wasn’t averse to the occasional heterosexual experience too and famously fathered a son. (He was also a terrible gambler and hopeless with money). But the word ‘Gay’ somehow doesn’t seem to suit him, and as far as I know there has been no major campaign to include Raven in the canon of ‘Gay Literature’. I have a feeling that if there is, it won’t get far. Somehow the two just don’t go together.

Raven’s sequence (not on any account to be confused with a dud second series called ‘The First-Born of Israel’ which are best forgotten) contain a series of major characters who reappear at various stages on life’s journey between schooldays in 1945, though the collapse of Empire, the Cold War, Suez, the Macmillan years and the first convulsions of the Cultural Revolution, and an elegiac and gloom-shadowed finale in the crumbling Venice of 1973, just before the great oil crisis ended the long party that had begun in the 1960s.

Several are based on people who were at school with Raven at Charterhouse during World War Two. One of them, who eventually became a Cabinet Minister and whose blushes I shall here spare by not identifying him, once said to me ‘Oh, Simon’s books … they’re just James Bond for p**fs!’. (It was the word he used. I suspect it now qualifies for asterisks in polite society). I think this summary is not entirely fair. Mind you, this particular person might not have been grateful for his portrayal which – though broadly sympathetic and in some ways admiring – is also an alarmingly disconcerting character analysis and contains one episode of superb deviousness dressed up in moral garments.

It is fairly well-known that another of his major characters, ‘Somerset Lloyd-James’, was based upon the late William Rees-Mogg, later Lord Rees-Mogg, who became Editor of ‘the Times’ and was of course the defender of Mick Jagger in the unforgettable ‘Who Breaks a Butterfly Upon a Wheel’ leader of 1967. I am told that Lord Rees-Mogg was never entirely happy with the way Raven wrote about him, and I am not surprised. It was always rather funny, seeing Lord Rees-Mogg on the television being grand, and comparing this figure with the flexible, cunning, lubricious and cleverly ambitious ‘Lloyd-James’.

But while these secret characters are fun, and while the books are more enjoyable if you know who they are (though some I have never guessed or worked out) the good bit is the writing. I’m not (I think) making any enormous claims for Raven. He certainly wasn’t trying to be literary, and is all the better for it. It is most of the time the fictional equivalent of George Orwell’s famous definition of good prose as a windowpane through which the reader can see clearly what the writer is saying. But he was extremely clever and very well educated, full of poetry and music, and especially of Homer. He loved the classics, and he loved English literature, and he loved poetry and he quite obviously loved the Army, and England too. From time to time he writes quite wonderfully about the English countryside, about the underestimated joys of being safe and warm in bad weather, and also about cricket in such a way that it makes even me, a loather of almost all sport, want to read on.

He once said that his only skill was an ability to arrange words in pleasing patterns, and this is both true and nothing like generous enough. It’s no mean skill.

For the most part his English is very plain, brisk and clean (which must have taken a great deal of work to achieve) but his imaginative power is tremendous (that is to say, he will fill your mind with moving, golden pictures) and , when you have set aside the various melodramatic events which he flings in (many of them inventive and enjoyable) he can portray real people, their thoughts and conversation, quite convincingly. He can also make you cry – the passage (in ‘Sound the Retreat’ ) on the death of Lord Muscateer, and his father’s lonely final voyage of reminiscence of his dead son, down the wintry river, is astonishingly moving.

Most of his main characters, as has been said, can be relied upon to behave badly under pressure, sloping off, cheating, betraying or otherwise letting everyone down. But by contrast bad people can turn out to show unexpected courage or generosity, which I would say is pretty true to life.

Much of the politics, academic behaviour, journalism, soldiering, skulduggery and publishing seem to me to be pretty true to life. One of the few utterly virtuous characters is Maisie, an inventive and unshockable prostitute who ends up providing her services to an astonishing number of the main figures in the saga. Another homosexual writer, Gore Vidal, also writes a great deal about prostitutes. But then again, so does the aggressively heterosexual John Steinbeck in East of Eden’, so perhaps this has no significance.

It is quite clear from the first book (‘Fielding Gray’), which is disagreeably but justifiably frank about public school homosexuality, that Raven specifically rejected Christianity as a mean and restrictive code. He half-believed in the Greek Gods, and in the vengeance of the Furies. Several of his characters suffer fates more fitted to a pagan than a Christian world – the central character, once a beautiful man, becomes hideous and repulsive. A woman who puts her aged, querulous mother in an old people’s home against her will receives a terrible warning and then suffers a ghastly death, economically but horribly described. A forgotten teenage dalliance produces monstrous progeny. He appears in the books thinly disguised as Fielding Gray (presumably in honour of the authors of Tom Jones and the ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’) and does not spare himself. There are scenes in this book which look like confession to me, and pretty serious confession at that.

Yet he plainly loved much of Christian England. In what is, in some ways the central volume of the series ‘Places Where They Sing’, the very title is a quotation from the Book of Common Prayer, and contains a very early denunciation of the pestilent use of modern Bible translations. There are references to John Bunyan, and a clear appreciation of the beauty of religious architecture and art, and of the need to preserve it from destruction. He must be the only 20th century author apart from Evelyn Waugh who would even try to refer seriously to the concept of honour, and he plainly loves the badges and trumpet calls of chivalry, already vanishing from England in his own boyhood, but just faintly echoing.

What I find striking about it ( apart from some absurd sex-scenes in which a female student shouts ‘Che!’ at moments of excitement) is the keen analysis of the left-wing revolt of the time, and his identification of the revolutionaries with the desire to destroy private life, to build new and ugly structures in lovely places, to wreck the joys of the elite because, if everyone cannot have them, then nobody must have them. The imagined conversations of the left-wing plotters, and the portrayal of their true leader. Mayerston, as a 1960s Mephistopheles, a believable demon in 20th century Cambridge, are very clever. Perhaps I also have a soft spot for this book as I was actually at school in Cambridge while the events it describes were supposedly going on. Actually, such things would not take place there until some time after 1967, the summer in which it is set. But the invasion of a college chapel by blasphemous protestors prefigures an actual event of the same kind, In St Patrick’s Roman Catholic Cathedral in New York, in December 1989.

Yes, there are racial epithets, which I suspect would have to stay to retain authenticity, especially in ‘Sound the Retreat’, set in the final months of British Imperial rule in India. The people speak and think and sneer as people of that kind did speak and sneer. Raven is a novelist, not a moralist, though the portrayal of a Muslim officer in the Indian Army in ‘Sound the Retreat’ suggests that he would (like many old-fashioned but fundamentally chivalrous people) have despised stupid racial prejudice in practice. Raven’s attitude towards Jews is very strange and hard to define, though only in the feeble ‘Come Like Shadows’ does he descend into crass anti-Semitism. Even then, I suppose, you could justify its presence by saying truly that people, thinking themselves unobserved, might well have said such things.

Honourable, honest, poetic, intelligent, fundamentally civilised, I think Raven deserves to survive his era. Not everyone can or will like ‘Alms for Oblivion’ (the title is a reference to a passage from Shakespeare’s ‘Troilus and Cressida’ in which Achilles speaks to Ulysses:

ACHILLES

‘… they pass'd by meAs misers do by beggars, neither gave to meGood word nor look: what, are my deeds forgot?’

ULYSSES

‘Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,Wherein he puts alms for oblivion,A great-sized monster of ingratitudes:Those scraps are good deeds past; which are devour'dAs fast as they are made, forgot as soonAs done: perseverance, dear my lord,Keeps honour bright: to have done is to hangQuite out of fashion, like a rusty mailIn monumental mockery. Take the instant way;For honour travels in a strait so narrow,Where one but goes abreast: keep then the path;For emulation hath a thousand sonsThat one by one pursue: if you give way,Or hedge aside from the direct forthright,Like to an enter'd tide, they all rush byAnd leave you hindmost;Or like a gallant horse fall'n in first rank,Lie there for pavement to the abject rear,O'er-run and trampled on: then what they do in present,Though less than yours in past, must o'ertop yours;For time is like a fashionable hostThat slightly shakes his parting guest by the hand,And with his arms outstretch'd, as he would fly,Grasps in the comer: welcome ever smiles,And farewell goes out sighing.’

Well, quite. And in the meantime, do not, under any circumstances, eat the Orange Meringue Pie at Ley Wong’s Chinese Restaurant. No good will come of it.

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21 May 2013 7:58 PM

It is time for a
few words on Swivelgate, or Loongate, now that the initial frenzy (which made
judicious comment difficult) has ended. These thoughts are stimulated by Mr Slippery’s
very funny letter to the remaining members of the Conservative Party, in which
he claims to be one of them, to love them like anything, and to deplore any
rude remarks about them which might (or might not) have been made by any of his
friends and cronies.

The issue of this
letter was announced on the same day that he flung himself into the arms of the
Labour Party, so as to rescue his beloved Same Sex Marriage Bill.

Which of these two
actions is the more revealing? It doesn’t take more than half a second to work
this out. In fact, ever since Norman St
John Stevas and Roy Jenkins co-operated to pilot the Obscene Publication Act
through Parliament back in 1959, there has been a cross-party alliance devoted
to putting through socially and politically revolutionary measures that lack
public support. The OPA was the prototype not only for Jenkins’s Permissive
Society (achieved through supposed
‘Private Members’ Bills’ which just happened to get lots of time and informal
government backing) in the 1960s, but also for the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971,
the only Bill ever to have been tabled in identical form by both Labour and
Tory Parties, and of course the cross-party alliance that got us into the
Common Market and keeps us there however much everyone hates it, and however
obviously it reveals itself as an Empire of which we are a powerless province.

If you believed in
‘Conspiracy Theories’, which of course only swivel-eyed loons do, you might see
this as a conspiracy of the liberal elite in both parties against what used in
those days to be a conservative electorate, and is now a declining but still
potent remnant. The Labour decision to
back drug liberalisation split Harold Wilson’s Cabinet down the middle – the
division being between working class Real Labour types, usually Christians,
from Scotland, Wales and the Trades Union movement, and university graduates,
cultural and moral revolutionaries working through the Labour Party for
profound change. The Real Labour men, of course, had far more in common with
the ‘Swivel-Eyed loons’ than they had with (say) Richard Crossman or Roy Jenkins.
But the tribal divisions of British politics kept them far apart, never to meet
or co-operate.

The liberals, by
contrast, were quite happy to reach out across what they recognized was a
fictional party divide, and have been
doing so for more than half a century. The danger, that the social
conservatives might achieve a similar alliance, never before seemed very
pressing. Now it does. UKIP is already attracting Labor voters, from among
those disgusted with the bourgeois bohemian concerns of the Blairite Party. And
Labour is very worried about this.

I will stay away
from the actual incident in which a person is said to have uttered the words
‘Swivel-Eyed Loons’ in front of a group of political reporters. I have looked into it a bit, and all I can say
is that it really doesn’t seem that unlikely to me that a senior Tory might have
said such a thing, but that it is interesting that it should now be regarded as
news (in fact the time between the alleged remark and the reporting of it was
several days). As I pointed out (to the
usual derisive laughter) during ‘Question Time’ late last year, David Cameron
hates his party. How could he not? The only puzzle was why his Party did not
return the favour (I think it was an absurd and overblown conception of ‘loyalty’,
a duty which a political party does not really deserve especially when it is
actively betraying the country). But now
at last they seem to be doing so.

The occasion for
this is the trivial side issue of same-sex marriage, about which few people under
60 care at all, one on which the built-in liberal elite majority in the Commons
can easily ignore their views. I suspect this is Mr Cameron’s calculation. As I
have said here before, he knows he cannot win the next election, so it will be
handy for him and his allies to be able to blame the ‘backwoodsmen’ ‘Turnip
Talebans’ and the rest for this inevitable defeat. If only we had embraced the
modern world properly, they will say (and their many mouthpieces in the media
will echo this), then we might have won.
They can then accelerate their slow-motion putsch and drive the
remaining conservative elements out of the Tory Party. The most nauseating
feature of this next stage is that it may well involve the arrival in the
leader’s chair of Mr Al Johnson, now mayor of London, a man who Tory activists
quaintly believe to be more conservative than David Cameron. He isn’t, I warn you now.

The only danger to
the liberal elite will come when the issue in dispute is one which actually
does bring together a majority of the country (immigration, crime and disorder
occur to me). It will be no use the parliamentary ‘progressives’ uniting on
that, if the electorate are united the other way. But ‘When will that be?’ ask the Bells of
Stepney. And ‘I do not know’, says the Great Bell of Bow.

In the meantime, a
few random thoughts on my discussion with Linda Grant, the novelist and my
fellow York Graduate. We talked about the sexual revolution at the Bristol
Festival of Ideas. Judging from the mood of the occasion (and from a little
traffic on Twitter), the sexual revolution is pretty much accepted as a Good
Thing among Bristol festival goers.

The interesting
thing about the collapse and evaporation of the Protestant Christian Religion
By Law Established is how quickly its principles have disappeared from the list
of things which it is permissible to think. On several occasions I noticed the
temperature of the room noticeably dropping, once when I read a passage from
the Prayer Book marriage service (pointing out that an honourable equality of
man and wife as each other’s helpmeets and companions was not in any way a new
idea) and once when I said that the ready acceptance of mass abortion showed us
all what we would actually do when a defenceless minority among us was being
killed off by brute force, that is to say, we would do nothing, as we now do about such an event in our midst, though we do not like being reminded of what it actually involves.

There were one or
two others: it is interesting that the
sexual revolutionaries like to consider themselves pretty free-wheeling, but a
blunt description of the old bargain (that
a woman would not offer a man sex until he married her) seemed to shock quite a
few of those present. So did the idea that it might be an honourable estate to
be in charge of raising the next generation.

Although the
discussion was built around the 50th anniversary of Betty Friedan’s
‘Feminine Mystique’ and plainly about the position of women above all, someone
sought to bring up the subject of homosexuality, and I could sense frustration
when I said it really wasn’t very important and had no organic connection with the
main issue under discussion. Some in the
audience – or so it seemed to me - would have liked me to do or say something
they could have filed away under ‘homophobia’, thus allowing them to dismiss me
as an unworthy human being, and this
wasn’t it. What I completely forgot to say (and I had been reading the relevant
passage the night before, so had no excuse) was that Betty Friedan herself was
none-too-friendly towards homosexuality. Those interested should turn to pages
221-224 of the Penguin Modern Classics edition of ‘The ‘Feminine Mystique’, but
it is striking that the mother of the modern Women’s Movement should have
written of ‘the homosexuality that is spreading like a murky smog over the
American scene’ and ‘male homosexuals –and the male Don Juans, whose compulsion
to test their potency is often caused by unconscious homosexuality – are, no
less than the female sex-seekers, Peter Pans, for ever childlike, afraid of
age, grasping at youth in their continual search for reassurance in some sexual
magic’.

Before anyone
tries to place any ambitious construction on this, I quote the above simply to
point out that this is what Mrs Friedan said, and that these words were written in 1963, not
because I agree with the words quoted, or indeed with much else that Mrs Friedan
argues.

One other thing
arose out of my meeting with Linda Grant. Before the event we were chatting
about the new film of ‘The Great Gatsby’, which we hadn’t seen but had heard (and
read) was pretty terrible. I said I wondered if it was hard to film because it
wasn’t actually that marvellous a book. There was a horrified silence. Linda
has since tweeted that I am ‘wrong’ to think this. I have replied that the greatness
(or otherwise) of books is not something about which one can be right or wrong.
Truth is the Daughter of Time, and so is a book’s greatness. ‘Gatsby’ (I suspect because it is shorter than
Fitzgerald’s other major works) gets on quite a lot of school and college reading
lists. But is it that good? I got out my old 1960s Penguin Modern Classic and
had a go, but the word ‘pretentious’ kept leaping into my mind, though not as
much as it does when I struggle with ‘Tender is the Night’. I’ve written before
here of a couple of passages (one of which I wrongly remembered as being from a
short story) that I like, but they are untypical of the book as a whole.

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07 March 2013 12:32 PM

Some of you may enjoy a Spectator podcast (link below) in which I argue with Damian Thompson about the existence of ‘addiction’. If you can stick it out till the end, he is enjoyably rude to me. He then stomped out of the room, melodramatically. I’m told he does this sort of thing quite often, which is, in a way, a pity. I had thought it was personal.

I hadn’t met Mr Thompson before, though I have often enjoyed his witty and mischievous writings in ‘The Daily Telegraph’ . As we waited in the ‘Spectator’ offices to make the recording, he said to me (this is a rough summary) that he used to like what I wrote, but then it became clear that I didn’t like homosexuals, and he changed his mind.

Much interested by this, I asked him what exactly it was that I had written which had caused him to form this view. He blustered about a bit, but couldn’t come up with anything. Was he sure he hadn’t mixed me up with someone else? He was sure. Well, I said, do please get in touch with me and let me know, if ever you do find the offending material. The alleged dislike is a secret from me. I have always been careful to distinguish the act from the person, and the political from the personal, as I distinguish opponents from enemies , but perhaps I am deceiving myself.

As we well know from the whole debate, the classification of the moral conservative as some sort of hater, suffering from a pathology or irrational loathing, is a short cut to victory in any debate, winning over most audiences even if it doesn’t win the actual argument. But I should have thought Mr Thompson, obviously intelligent and educated, was above that. I’d also have thought Mr Thompson was above the suggestion that compassion and human kindness can only be expressed through indulgence of bad actions. Yet his cross dismissal of me as ‘sanctimonious’ suggests that he isn’t that far above it.

One further thought on Russell Brand’s bizarre argument. Let us try another line of approach: Mr Brand says addicts are ‘totally powerless over [their]addiction’ But he has disproved his own argument by having himself resisted the temptation to take drugs for (he says) ten years. He says he is drawn to the idea of drugs every time he has a setback in his life, but equally, that he has resisted it. So he's not totally powerless. He is in fact totally powerful.

Responsible humans are attracted to things and decide on balance not to do them. My aim is to help people, especially the young, to resist the temptations of things that are demonstrably bad for them and for everyone they know, and for the functioning of our society.

If Mr Brand had a physical illness like tonsillitis, or an injury such as a broken leg, it really wouldn't matter whether he wanted to give in to them or not. Whatever he thought, he wouldn't be able to change the fact. THis is absolutely not so with 'addiction'.

Russell Brand has, in fact, agreed with me, though he still doesn’t realise it. The problem with drug users is not that they have some physical or even mental problem that they can do nothing about. They can do something about it. It's called having self-control. I have a dream that one day, Mr Brand will find the courage to say : ‘Yes, it's all about self -control. There is no such thing as addiction. Peter Hitchens is right.’ It may be a while, though.